In the world of sports, many statistics are generated for each players in each game, and many games are played in a season. Yahoo!® Sports and other information sources typically display this statistical data and present it to the user as a listing or table of data values. Users may read this statistical data for a variety of reasons, e.g., to analyze the past performance of a sports team or player for the purpose of improving the future performance of a fantasy sports team. While the information a user is looking for may be present in the displayed data, it is often difficult to determine if a player is consistently doing well, or has achieved something statistically special in a given game.
For example, FIG. 3 shows a listing of a National Hockey League (NHL) player's game statistics for the month of March. Because of the quantity of numerical information displayed, it is difficult to see what is important and when the player did well over a series of games. A user might be interested in knowing if the player ever went on a multi-game goal streak or if the player scored a hat trick (i.e., three goals in one game). A user looking at the table shown in FIG. 3 will probably have difficulty focusing on what is important; because nothing visually stands out in the table of data.
Furthermore, sports fans are often interested in statistical records, such as the longest goal streak in the NHL, the players that are currently on some sort of streak, the players that have done something statistically significant recently, and other numbers-driven achievements. Therefore, it would be desirable to display sports statistics in a way that visually emphasizes data that represents exceptional performance.